Therapy
Dynamic Health Psychological Services is a centre of excellence for providing Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP).
Learn more about ISTDP and how it could help you move forward with what is important in your life. Our team of experienced clinicians specialize in ISTDP and have extensive training in delivering evidence-based treatment. Following careful assessment, we can discuss an approach and treatment plan that is tailored to your individual needs.
We offer psychological services for a range of commonly experienced difficulties:
Functional Symptoms
Have you undergone unclear or negative medical tests for physical symptoms, such as those listed below? Approximately 10% of people at some point in their life will experience a painful or distressing physical symptoms that persist despite a lack of medical explanation (i.e., absence of known pathology). Symptoms can be exacerbated when individuals find it difficult to control illness worry and become preoccupied with understanding the cause of their symptoms. Somatic Symptom Disorder is the current diagnostic label used to describe these related issues.
Have you had unclear or negative medical tests for physical symptoms?
Do you find it difficult to control your anxiety about illness or physical symptoms?
Perhaps you experience ongoing symptoms despite prescribed medications?
Do you notice your physical symptoms are worse during stressful life events?
When an individual experiences physical symptoms a medical treatment is logically expected. This can lead to physicians ordering extensive investigations searching for a medical illness (i.e., organic cause) because they are trained to firstly diagnose bodily symptoms. When tests are negative and therefore treatment is unclear, this can be difficult to understand when symptoms and pain are present.
It may feel as though physicians are saying “it is all in your head”. In fact, it is more accurate to describe the way individuals experience physical pain as about mind-body connections. The reason is that the body’s pain centres are in the head (brain), which is linked to the body, where pain and physical symptoms are experienced. This mindset involves considering connections between body and mind. If you are open to this possibility, trained clinicians can work with you to assess the role of stress and emotional contributors to physical symptoms. Talk therapy and improved self-management can help address emotional factors involved in bodily distress symptoms resulting in symptom reduction and increased well-being.
There are a range of bodily distress symptom presentations that can respond well to talk therapy treatment. These include:
- Irritable Bowel
- Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
- Conversion Disorder
- Fibromyalgia
- Psychogenic Movement Disorders
- Sexual health (erectile dysfunction, genital pain)
- Tension headaches and migraine
- Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS)
- Unexplained gastrointestinal symptoms (Abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting)
- Neurological symptoms (body weakness, dizziness, fainting, tinnitus, visual disturbance)
- Non-epileptic Seizures
- Urethral Syndrome
- Non-organic chest pain
Mental & Emotional health
Every year, 1 in 5 Canadians will experience a mental health or addiction problem. This includes negative effects on a person’s mood, thinking and behaviour leading to a wide range of difficulties such as depression, anxiety and problematic substance use. When surveyed, many Canadians agree they have not asked for help despite experiencing such problems. With the appropriate treatment, most people recover.
A person’s difficulties are never too big or too small to seek help for. If you or someone you know is experiencing mental and emotional illness, remember that this is no different from physical illness – help is available. It can be a relief to learn more about why you are experiencing these difficulties and importantly what you can do to start making positive changes. Receiving the necessary help and support at the earliest opportunity can help you to regain a sense of control and begin to start finding more enjoyment in life.
All mental or emotional illness can be treated. We provide therapy for a range of issues, including:
- Adjustment difficulties to major life transitions
- Anxiety, chronic worry, obsessive-compulsive
- Depressed mood, low energy, no enjoyment, poor sleep, low appetite
- Eating disorders, weight issues, body image
- Grief, loss, bereavement
- Personality disorder
- Phobias, fears and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Relationship difficulties
- Self-harm
- Sexual difficulties
- Stress and burnout
- Substance use
Operational stress injury
An Operational Stress Injury (OSI) refers to the persistent psychological effects tied to occupational service in the armed forces or police. It is a term that can be helpful for encompassing a range of difficulties which interfere with daily functioning. Examples of OSI’s include depression, anxiety, substance-use issues, stress-related medical issues, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as other conditions. These can lead to difficulties in family, personal and work functioning. Common stress-related physical symptoms include: headache and migraine; nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea; and chronic muscle tightness which makes pain related to physical injuries worse.
An OSI is a health problem that requires appropriate treatment in the same way as physical injuries, such as shrapnel wounds or a damaged limb. OSI’s can relate to a single incident or an accumulation of events. Difficulties coming to terms with these events can appear soon after a work stressor, years later, or they may seem to get better and worse over time but never seem to go away completely.
Understanding that symptoms of OSI’s are an expectable reaction to stress is an important first step to take towards recovery. This is often necessary to help prevent a person from getting too down on themselves, and to provide the motivation needed to start to talk about their experiences.
If you are concerned that you or someone close to you may be experiencing an OSI, you can contact one the following services to allow you to be referred to the clinic at Dynamic Health:
- Current regular members of the Canadian Armed Forces can speak to their health care provider on base to discuss their concerns.
- Veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces or retired RCMP can approach their Area Counsellor at Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC), or call the contact Centre, at 1-866-522-2122.
- Members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police should speak to their Health Services Officer.
Work & School stress
With the amount of time people spend at work and school, or preoccupied thinking about them, well-being can understandably become closely tied to this part of a person’s life.
While stress in itself is not inherently bad, it is inevitable, and therefore finding healthy ways of coping is important. Getting overwhelmed at times of chronic and acute stress can stop a person from being their best self. For example, you may have started to notice changes in sleep, appetite, stomach sickness, energy levels, headaches, loss of interest or pleasure in activities, feeling nervous, sad, self-critical, empty or guilty. How you act in relationships with family, friends and colleagues may be being negatively affected, though you may not always realise this.
If you or someone close to you are stuck in a rut, and the usual ways of coping are not working, speaking to an experienced professional to arrange an assessment meeting can be your first step toward improvement.
Depending upon a person’s personality, situations at work or school stressors are experienced differently. For instance, how a person balances the perceived importance of social acceptance and relationships, compared to the value of feeling competent and independent, can affect how a person feels about themselves and others. As such, what is experienced as stressful at work or school to one person is not necessarily the same for the next person. Treatment therefore needs to be tailored to your needs. It is also important to recognize that whether or not the perceived or actual expectations and demands experienced at work and school are “fair”, individuals are often not in a position to change other peoples’ behaviour. Psychotherapy can therefore help individuals focus less on what others’ do and instead enhancing control over how these experiences affect their own mental and emotional health.
At Dynamic Health, we will help you to get to the route of the thoughts and feelings that are being triggered at work or school that have become overwhelming and cause you problems. In this way, you can address the issues that burden you, allowing you to find or return to, more positive ways of coping and feeling greater fulfilment.
THERAPY NON-RESPONSE
On average, psychotherapy treatments for mental and emotional illness are effective, often much more so than some routinely used medical treatment for physical illnesses. It is also true that no treatment approach is successful all of the time, including psychotherapy. When a person does not experience a satisfactory treatment response, or their difficulties reoccur – be it following a medication trial, psychotherapy sessions, a mixture of the two, or multiples trials of each – it can be challenging not to feel demoralized.
At Dynamic Health, we specialize in working with people who have experienced the situation of therapy non-response. Our primary approach here is Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP). Part of what makes this advanced treatment different to commonly provided talk therapies is that the course of therapy does not follow a pre-determined structure with session content planned out ahead of time. ISTDP is designed to address common obstacles to talking about life problems and feeling better.
Treatment is tailored to what a person is experiencing and how this impacts their behaviours moment-to-moment in the session. In this way, therapy can begin to help individuals understand and overcome patterns that have been holding them back. Find out more about ISTDP.
couples therapy
We provide therapy for couples for a range of commonly experienced issues:
Adjustment to children and parenting
Coping with infidelity
Enhancing communication
Grieving family losses
Improving emotional closeness and intimacy
Other relationship difficulties
Sexual difficulties
Working through conflict
Within a couple, there is potential to fulfil different needs for one another, to make for a healthy and rewarding relationship. Whether the couple chooses to prioritize: intimacy, closeness, emotional support, friendship, practical support, or various combinations of these over time, all represent choices. However, a couple can be more or less aware of the patterns and habits that have grown and developed in their relationship. The way in which they behave and respond towards one another may no-longer sufficiently fulfil one or both of the couple’s core needs.
At Dynamic Health, couples therapy is an opportunity to look at these patterns, understand them, and if a couple chooses to, start to think, feel and act differently because they recognize there is a shared wish for something more.
To begin couples therapy, this requires at least one but ideally both partners to recognise that they are not sufficiently happy with parts or aspects of the relationship. Whether or not this is clear at the start, therapy can help you establish this upfront. It is then possible to agree a plan for working together in therapy and the best means to approach this. Recognizing that relationships take two people, couples therapy can make clear the roles that each partner plays and how each contributes respectively and collectively to situations. Therapy will ultimately involve individual change on behalf of each partner, as well as adaptation as a couple to better address one another’s needs within the relationship.
Assessment
We provide comprehensive psychological assessments for adults. These focus on assessing for the presence and impact of mental and emotional illness such as Mood Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders, Personality disorders, and Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders. Assessments are commonly requested by government agencies, physicians, lawyers and mental health professionals.
Psychological assessments serve to summarise complex information about an individual’s functioning related to their mental and emotional health and also provide recommendations for psychological treatment where appropriate.